THE OBVERSE SIDE OF FIBER OPTIC INTERFACE
(C)1993 Alan M. Schwartz
John Charles Custer Malone and his multi-billion dollar Tele-
Communications, Inc. are determined to, in cooperation with the
official US government, various sub rosa Federal organizations,
and major portions of the US financial community, hardwire every
office, home and lean-to in Colorado with a fiber optic interface
- the first off-ramp of a national interactive data highway. One
can spin visions of interactively working at home, interactively
shopping at home, interactively gaining instant access to the
entirety of human knowledge and experience across the globe...
and sitting down with a dram of fine single malt Scotch before
your TV and interactively deciding whether Mistress Babette will
choose the peacock feather or the leather quirt for entertaining
our securely bound and splayed hero on the Adult Channel.
I suspect motives are based less in humanism or altruism than in
capitalism. Replacing service workers' commutes to and from the
office with net information transfer would drastically rebalance
trade in petroleum products and render our major roads once again
capable of sustaining their flows. Implications that the primary
American industrial product is gossip are diagnostic of an
economically interesting future. In Irvine, CA visible antennas
are illegal and the ceramic roofing pantiles are notably opaque
to electromagnetic radiation. If you wish to be connected to
civilization it will cost you perhaps $300 each year paid in
monthly installments for basic cable service. As any IRS
strategist will inform you, the best way to painlessly separate a
person from the contents of his wallet is to exact a modest but
frequent mandatory deduction - forever. "Pay up, or we pull your
plug and charge you for that, too."
Current First World governments' computerized information
gathering capabilities would have driven Stalin to tears of envy.
A modest inquiry directed to the Department of Motor Vehicles,
the Internal Revenue Service, or Social Security can within
seconds allow a $5/hour semi-sentient minority hireling access to
everything there is to know about your life since you were born,
annotated with names, dates, addresses and cash amounts. Every
cent you earned by any means, every cent you spent traceable by
check, credit card or receipt, every aspect of your legal,
social, recreational and mercantile existence is on-line. It is
all available to mass-mailers for a price, above-board or below.
Imagine how much simpler it will be, for everybody, when every
facet of your life is continuously available for surreptitious
monitoring in real time. The dream of recreating history to suit
contemporary needs - so clumsily executed by Soviet airbrushes
and incessant propaganda - will condense into a simple database
update. IRS confiscations will default to flipping a single
status byte. The USSR was overthrown by Levi's jeans and
McDonald's hamburgers media-inculcated into its citizens'
consciousness. Our government learns by observing. It will
exert total control over official truth AND the commercials.
Such is the beauty of cable - no external input is accepted.
Such is the beauty of fiber optic cable - no low-tech splices can
be crafted.
Extraordinary transmission bandwidth is intrinsic to concurrently
processing millions of paired interactive video uplinks and
downlinks. We anticipate a vast conversion of hi-tech defense
production to officially mandated hi-tech consumer hardware.
Terminals and their communications allocations within the system
will spend the vast bulk of their timeslots - even while being
used - waiting for user input. What a waste it would be to have
this preponderance of virtual downtime undedicated to profitable
acquisition. Acoustic raw data is less than 0.1% the volume of
video data. Monochrome solid state cameras operating in the
visible or near infrared can be as small as a tube of lip balm,
and their datastreams compressed to 10% or less of their nominal
volume on the fly. You look and listen to your terminal; your
terminal looks and listens to you, always. The button marked
"OFF" will be a fractionally greater cosmetic embellishment than
it already is. No advanced electronic equipment like a TV, VCR
or cable encoder ever powers down all its circuitry short of
having its plug pulled, and many have internal batteries to
weather that assault.
The National Data Highway promises to be a telling step in the
evolution of the human mind. Information and discourse, the raw
stuff of thought, will flood into every human life. I support
the National Data Highway with two stipulations: A) that I CAN
turn the hardware off, AND disconnect it from the wall, and B)
that I MAY turn the hardware off, AND disconnect it from the
wall. And examine the internal structure of new buildings for
concealed bugs. And disable the chipset that broadcasts my car's
velocity and location to waiting cops. And...